Have you ever been in a situation when you needed to create surveys to accomplish your chosen goals? Maybe it was something like gathering contact information of the target audiences or you need to create a sequence of product listings of your audience’s choice to see the responses.
What have you used to get out of this situation? If you already knew about Google Forms at that time, you would use it. But if not, then you might have taken the help of other online survey making or question answering based tools like SurveyMonkey or survey legend.
Since you are here to know the pros and cons of Google Forms, it makes sense that you are still unknown in this regard. For your convenience, Google form is one of the most helpful integrations offered by google. Undoubtedly, Google Forms can make your day easier and allow you to implement things more professionally and quickly. Google form comes with a bunch of useful options which are implemented to take surveys, online polls, pop quizzes.
Therefore, google form is a great option for all types of busy people like online marketers, teachers, students, using them for personal party invitations, and so on.
If you are still away from taking advantage of this great integration, then it would be wonderful that google form is almost free. You can create as many survey forms, registration, order, and whatever you want to do with it.
In this discussion, we will disclose all the aspects of google Forms, if you are new to this beneficial integration, then it will help you to get used to the tool right now.
Contents
What are the advantages of google Forms?
First, let’s take a look at the advantages of Google Forms. As Google makes it super easy to use the google form, you can do a lot of things with this. Here we give out all the possible advantages that come with a google form.
Easy to use interface
Google makes the interface for Google Form integration almost easy to use and user friendly. There are some other surveys making tools available that you can find easily online. if you take a look and compare them with Google Forms, you can understand its authenticity.
If you are a first timer, you can easily get what you have to do to create a new form. all the included options like customization, giving the title and description to your form, observing responses, sharing is simple and readily manageable. This is why online activists all over the world prefer this integration over other survey making tools.
Free
It is highly mentionable that google form is a free integration that accelerates a huge online process like distance learning, survey making, helping online retailers to get consumers’ opinions, and so on. as it is free, small online retailers can use it to save money.
Because there are other surveys making tools that require a monthly and yearly fee to use. although these paid tools offer a lot more than google form, when you can do it effectively without any cost, then why would you go to spend some extra money. However, if you find google form is not so perfect for you, then you can go for other available paid survey making tools online.
Create as much as you want
With google form, you can create as many free polls, pop quizzes, surveys, and other forms as you want. to save your time, it offers templates you can use to quickly manage surveys if that meet your requirement.
There are other surveys making tools that allow only a few free trials to users that isn’t enough although. they are simply implemented to accomplish big companies’ data management purposes. but in my opinion, there is nothing better than google form if you are a small retailer.
create all forms of question
Implementing surveys requires a suitable question pattern that can lure audiences and make them provide answers according to the questions. survey questions are mainly depending on the answers you want to get from the audiences.
The type of answers will decide how you should create the form. google form supports all sorts of available question patterns. with this, you can easily implement
- short answer – to ask for identical information, contact information, and so on for example, what is your name
- paragraph – if you ask something which needs quite long to answer for the audiences, then you can set the paragraph to comfort while answering and avoid word limitation
- multiple choice, checkbox and drop down list – if you want to provide multiple choices to audiences, then you can set question type in this form. especially for quizzes, polls, and collecting opinions of a selective group of people, you have to implement this type of questions to get the best answers
- Linear scale – linear scale has become a popular question form of online surveys as it comes like a ranking system. a linear scale is mostly used to get feedback and reviews about particular brands, software, apps, systems, services, and products. if you choose linear scale in your survey form, you have to set a number level to allow audiences to give a rating on your required topics
- Date and time – you can use a google form to ask specific time and date like audience birth date, when they joined the group and such kind of similar time and date required questions
Take a few minutes to create surveys
Google forms easy to use interfaces designed like creating and implementing. No matter what type of forms you want to create, you can make it within a few minutes. Even if you weren’t using it previously, it will let you understand all the options in the first meeting.
Keep you organize
It is one of the good sides of google form as it keeps users organized with a bunch of data through storing and managing them properly. Whenever a survey is conducted, huge people take part in that. Conventionally, a survey asks for selective information and people attend that by providing the required information. The process is done by forms either online or offline.
Whatever, since so many people join the survey to achieve the goal behind this, you must have considered the huge information which you get a response. if you don’t take steps to collect data from responses, then the survey will go in vain.
With Google Forms, you don’t have to worry about such issues. Because google form will simply let you link the form with google sheets so that all the responses will automatically save to your preferred file. When you send a form, you can gather the responses inside the form or separately in Google Sheets.
Customizable
Though it is limited and not as effective as other survey tools, it must be included when we are talking about the pros and cons of Google Forms. When you are creating online forms with a google form, you can customize the form in a few aspects and can make it friendly for your audiences.
Customization is simple and not so good though. You can customize a few things such as the color theme of the form. You can also set an image for the header or can use an image as a background, you can also particularly change the background color and font style.
Collaboration available
Google has added easy collaboration systems to stay updated with conducted surveys online. Yes, you can add whoever you want as a collaborator in the form you have prepared. If you need to work with some colleagues in any survey, then you have to set them as a collaborator so they would be able to change if anything requires.
Collaborating is highly necessary for survey integrations because if the survey is something large and calls a wide range of people to integrate with it. Then you may find it difficult to control it single handedly.
Therefore, google includes the collaborative function in google forms, and not just that, you also have a group chat option on the side through which you can work with your collaborators simultaneously and chat with each other at the same time.
Remember, making collaborators in such a platform means you are giving them full access to edit and make changes in the form.
sections and logic branching
Simply put, branching is something differentiating a form with different questions and pages of information. These questions as well as pages are created based on your target audiences as they can interact with the form how they answer the previous questions.
In other words, branching in Google Forms is a way to send a respondent to a different page or question based on how they answer. In the online journey, we often face surveys that seem to be organized with our preferred issues.
Branching lets organizers create forms with multiple choice questions but the form will act differently according to how respondents answer the questions. In google forms, you can easily create the survey form with a bunch of sections and can set how they would appear in front of the respondents while they are answering the questions.
Logic branching adds a new turn in online surveys. Through this, educators can easily implement online educational forums and can create forms differently for students, parents, and other attendees. In my opinion, it is such a great addition in google form that helps people to accomplish great necessaries.
When you have done preparing the survey form for your purpose, it’s time to share the form on the selective where you want people to integrate with the form. The process isn’t done until you get the form to your target audiences.
Google form allows you to share the created form to any distinctive platform you want to share it. Different people have different purposes to create forms, some may want to capture marketing campaigns, some want to use feedback and reviews, teachers use this for distance learning and so on.
According to the needs, the form should have to be shared in particular places like websites, direct mail, social media, etc. no matter where you want to share the online form, it has separate options to make the job easy for you.
Get an email notification for responses
Responses which you get from individuals when they submit the form provided by you. In your google form window open, you can see two sections, one is the form page and the other is the response page. the system automatically gathered responses from the public on the response page which you can see anytime and take action on them.
Google Forms creates and serves to get answers to your preferred questions. since google form is one of Google’s product, therefore, they have linked both google Forms and Gmail thinking of the user needs.
For users, they can get email notifications for every new response submitted on the form. it just requires setting up a simple setting on the response tab, finds the option ‘Get email notifications for all new responses’ and you will notify via email for new responses.
However, the notifications that come in your email include only the link through which you can redirect to your google form and can see the response. but if you want, you can make a little change and get notifications with an overview and also a summary of responses every day.
Also, there are some other ways to get detailed google form response results in your email. you can google it if you are interested in such an issue.
Great for educational purpose
A google form is a great tool for both students and teachers. especially in the present situation when all the educational institutions are being closed due to the pandemic. We are facing the importance of online as all the educational activities are going through online.
Online teaching, as well as distance learning, is the future of brick and mortar type educational institutions. For this purpose, we are familiar with a lot of software and applications through which we can learn anything with practical lessons in our home.
Google form is considered a great educational tool because of the features it offers. there are plenty of reasons for which you can use google form for educational purposes. Here are a few of them to make sense in this regard.
- with google form, teachers can create opinion surveys to learn about students’ preferences
- parent surveys
- teachers can create lesson plans to keep students up to date about the next day’s lesson planning
- sign up and sign out sheets for monitoring attendance in online class
- teachers can create a quick poll and pop quizzes to make lessons interesting for the students
In this way, google forms can be used for so many educational activities online. Also, there are helpful add ons and google chrome extensions designed to make it easier and more flexible for the teachers and students. You can use them and benefit a little.
Highly recommended for online activists
From the above advantages, we have known that google form is undoubtedly a helpful integration that comes in benefits for all types of people. We also know that it has some extra advantages for personal and educational use.
It is true that google form is also fit for business activities. Since all the business activities are now going through online, there comes the necessity of such online survey making tools to implement online goals and achievements.
For example, if you are an online retailer, you must know the importance of consumer feedback and reviews in order to make your online store trustworthy in the view of new audiences. When purchasing items online, there are a plethora of online stores that hesitate clients to make decisions about where to get the product.
In such a situation, they mostly do the thing which is checking reviews and feedbacks of previous of those stores and determining the trustable one.
Google form will help them get feedback easily. For small retailers, it is an extra cost by creating paid survey tools. They can reduce and make it zero by using google Forms as it is completely free.
What are the disadvantages of google Forms?
In the above, we came up with the advantages of google form that is surely enough to make one mind to use the integration if they need. But you have to know, as with other great integrations, google form is not free from defects.
It also has some disadvantages too. Though they are not so in numbers, it is important to know about them when you are going to use this as your permanent survey maker. However, here we have managed five disadvantages of google form which can make you feel disgusting sometimes.
So, if you are interested, you can check the discussion here below.
Need internet connection
The first cons of google Forms that I want to know about you are its dependability on the internet. As the other services of google like google drive, docs, sheets, etc, google form also requires a suitable internet connection to access you in it.
So, if you don’t have an internet connection, you won’t be able to access the google form interface or make any changes to your existing forms.
Must have a google account
It is not only for google form but all the other Google integrations of google, as you just need a google account if you want to use any of them. Without a Google account, you won’t be allowed to use any of the Google services like Gmail, google drive, and google workspace. Therefore, you must have a google account to use google form for your purpose.
Creating/signing up with a google account doesn’t cost anything. It is almost free and comes with so many profitable options for you. Just create a google account and enjoy all the free integrations Google offers you.
Limited customization
I would like to mention this point as it seems irritating to me. Google form is a Google product that is highly useful because of its easy installation of surveys, personal invitation forms, and also for business usage.
Unfortunately, Google Forms doesn’t have a good customization option that we have already known in the above customization option. We see it offers a few actions to customize your form in a few aspects such as typography, color, and theme.
In my opinion, Google should offer more customization options to allow people to make their form more fascinating.
Upload limitations
Whatever purpose you are using a google form, you may require to get information and resources from the respondents as a file type like their image, or a text file, etc. if you are a recruiter and you have created a recruitment post and instruct applicants to upload their resume, then you must have to know about such uploading limitations of google form.
Google form has several limitations in its uploading system. Though it is a great option to make online forms and call for any types of attachments from the respondents. For your information, google form allows attachments like documents, presentations, spreadsheets, drawings, PDFs, images, video, and audio files in forms.
But before intending to get attachments from the audience with your forms, you must have some things in your mind. They are,
- if you want to upload a folder in google form, you can’t do that as it doesn’t allow folders to upload. you can upload only one file at a time
- you have to be a signed-in user if you want to upload files in the form
- google form has a 10 MB maximum file size limit per form but it is a by default option which you can change and set up to 1 TB from the settings
- you have to include different names to the uploaded files for further quick sorting
Need huge improvement
Lastly, I found a lot of things that need to be improved in the google form. If you also get to use it regularly, you will find the aspects which it needs to work. Above all, it is a free integration and as such, it has a lot of benefits and a few defects. Hope google will work on them soon in the future and make it more exciting for the users.
Finally, google form has both pros and cons, but its pros are more than its consecutive disadvantages. Despite having such bad sides, I still recommend it to be used to create any type of survey forms and to get feedback and reviews if you are an ecommerce retailer. Above all, compared with other paid survey management tools, google form is the best free option to stay organized with huge data and responses conceded through online surveys and forms. Therefore, you can use it freely or can go for other paid tools.